My segment of the masterclass offers a reassessment of Galileo’s astronomical pursuits in his earlier, Paduan years: roughly, from 1600 to 1610, with two chronological exceptions related to medieval optics and the cometary debate. The choice of these texts reflects my general project in Bucharest (“Galileo’s People: Mapping Scientific Networks and Reading Practices in Early Modern Italy”) and the consolidation of interests around three areas of inquiry: (a) rhetoric and print culture; (b) the ‘mathematization’ of the language of nature, including the pursuit of secrets and the Venetian culture of expertise; (c) the brokering activity of historical actors in the Mediterranean.

By avoiding the traditionally stark contrast between observation and bookish erudition, I aim instead to align the Sidereus nuncius and its surrounding documents within the view point of humanist paper technology, and to reflect on the book’s epistemic unity almost as a side-effect of the household’s centrality in Peripatetic culture. Indeed, my exposition considers private Venetian or Paduan ‘academies’ under three related aspects: first, as the institutional architecture that enabled the use of laboratories and the transformation of the artisanal body; second, as the anchor of a mobility of mechanical labour and epistolary exchange that ranged from the Aegean Sea to the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth; and third, as a site of tension between Latin and vernacular, which in turn opens to a new look over the debated question of the transferability of Galileo’s new science.

My ultimate goal, throughout and beyond the masterclass, is to disarticulate the Sidereus nuncius as the result of collective desiderata and to suggest a way to write a social history of early science in the Veneto, seen at the intersection of two disciplines that rarely talk to one another—namely, natural empiricism and history of collecting.